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THE VISITOR
Written & Directed by Tom McCarthy
Produced by Mary Jane Skalski & Michael London
Director of Photography, Oliver Bokelberg
Edited by Tom McArdle
Music by Jan A. P. Kaczmarek
Released by Overture Films
USA 103 min. Rated PG-13
With Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira & Hiam Abbass

There’s a character in American independent cinema that materializes in film after film – the shell of a former self, the numb sleepwalker coasting through a vacant life. In Tom McCarthy’s follow-up to his debut The Station Agent, that character is an economics professor at a Connecticut university who has lost his way after his wife’s death. As we watch Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins of HBO’s Six Feet Under) float from a listless lecture to a lonely home, where he coolly tries to reignite his life with piano lessons (a tribute to his late pianist wife), the film feels destined to end in a touching life awakening.

And it comes courtesy of an unexpected trip to New York for a global economics conference, where Walter discovers a young, ethnic-chic couple – he’s a Syrian drummer, she’s Senegalese jewelry designer – unwittingly squatting in his unused pied à terre. In an unexpected act of kindness (though it comes as more of a surprise to him than the audience), the prickly professor lets them stay with him until they can make other arrangements.

As the uptight and very Caucasian Walter begins to express interest in Tarek’s African drum, The Visitor suddenly shits from a well-acted and mostly sober film to a downright exercise in cuteness. Watching Walter – suit, name tag, stony expression, and all - writhe to the beat of drum players in Washington Square Park or, after he takes to the instrument, play in rowdy Central Park drum circles, we laugh from the sheer delight of the charming spectacle. Unquestionably, Walter’s serendipitous encounter with a new rhythm and a new friend is the highpoint of this gently heartwarming film.

If only the film ended there. Instead, what begins as an inward meditation on a lost man finding himself through music, friendship, and the thrill of a multicultural New York devolves into a rhetorically shallow dialogue about immigration. When Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) is arrested as an illegal alien, the film quickly takes a dramatic downturn, eliciting clumsy moments of candor from the reticent Walter, a budding relationship with Tarek’s mother (Hiam Abbass), and trite discussion of American border control. And though this debate remains wisely nonjudgmental, McCarthy’s decision to hijack his otherwise lovely project with the towering issue of immigration crushes the film under the weight its ambition. Yana Litovsky
April 13, 2008